Chapter 8. Evaporation and Wicking

Abstract

Wicking and evaporation occur simultaneously in a variety of situations. In this chapter, we present and study several aspects of wicking/evaporation when evaporation is external mass transfer driven and unconfined or weakly confined. These include the influence of evaporation on the final impregnation height and the impregnation dynamics, the structure and the influence of the evaporation flux density distribution along the wick surface and the transport of a dissolved species. Other effects, still poorly studied, such as the influence of liquid films or the shape of the internal evaporation front in the wick are also addressed. Despite the practical importance of wicking / evaporation situations, this chapter also shows that further works are needed to increase our understanding of the combined action of wicking and evaporation and our prediction capabilities.